Fire fighters inspect the site of a car bomb at the al-baiyaa area of western Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, January 2, 2010.

It is unknown if US or UK black operations special forces, or US or UK contractors, are involved.

Photo: AP/Khalid Mohammed

Ali Mohammed killed when guards employed by security company Blackwater, now known as Xe, opened fire at Nisoor Square in 2007

Mohammed Hafiz holds a picture of his late 10-year-old son, Ali Mohammed, who was killed when guards employed by security company Blackwater, now known as Xe, opened fire at Nisoor Square in 2007, in Baghdad, Iraq.

Seeking justice for 17 people shot dead at the Baghdad intersection relatives and loved ones responded with bitterness and outrage Friday, Jan. 1, 2010, at a U.S. judge's decision to throw out a case against Blackwater security guards accused in the killings.

Seven years after the US under Bush first bombed Iraq into submission and then occupied the country, Iraq is still occupied by the US, now under Obama, in 2010.

Photo taken October 4, 2007: AP/Khalid Mohammed

America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Counting Iraqi Casualties  and a Media Controversy

The author commissioned the "Lancet" study recently attacked in a National Journal report and by the Wall Street Journal. He calls the criticism a "hatchet job," fraudulent or based on innuendo.

By John Tirman

(February 14, 2008 Commentary) One puzzling aspect of the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is their squeamish treatment of Iraqi casualties. The scale of fatalities and wounded is a difficult number to calculate, but its importance should be obvious. Yet, apart from some rare and sporadic attention to mortality figures, the topic is virtually absent from the airwaves and news pages of America. This absence leaves the field to gross misunderstandings, ideological agendas, and political vendettas.

The upshot is that the American public  and U.S. policy makers, for that matter  are badly informed on a vital dimension of the war effort.

As an academic interested in the war’s violence, I commissioned a household survey in October 2005 to gauge mortality, and I naturally turned to the best professionals available  the Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists who had conducted such surveys before in Iraq, Congo, and elsewhere. Their survey of 1,850 households resulted in a shocking number: 600,000 dead by violence in the first 40 months of the war. The survey was extensively peer reviewed and published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006.

The findings caused a ripple of interest (in part because President Bush, during a press conference, called the results “not credible”) and stirred a very lively debate among the few people interested in the methods. By and large, however, the survey passed from public view fairly quickly, and the news media continued to cite the very low numbers produced by the Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO that counts civilian deaths through English-language newspaper reports.

Another survey, this one undertaken by a private U.K. firm, Opinion Business Research (ORB), found more than one million dead through August 2007. Yet another, a much larger house-to-house survey was conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health (MoH). This also found a sizable mortality figure  400,000 “excess deaths” (the number above the pre-war death rate), but estimated 151,000 killed by violence. The period covered was the same as the survey published in The Lancet, but was not released until January 2008.

The ORB results were almost totally ignored in the American press, and the MoH numbers, which did get one-day play, were covered incompletely. Virtually no newspaper report dug into the data tables of the Iraqi MoH report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for that total excess mortality figure, or to ask why the MoH report showed a flat rate for killing throughout the war when every other account shows sharp increases through 2005 and 2006. The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that people responding to interviewers from the government, and a ministry controlled by Moktada al Sadr, would not want to admit that their loved one died by violence. There were, instead, very large numbers of dead by road accidents and “unintentional injuries.” The American press completely missed this.

What some in the news media did not miss, however, was a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the Lancet article by the National Journal, the “insider” Capitol Hill weekly.

The attack, by reporters Carl Cannon and Neil Munro, which was largely built on persistent complaints of two critics and heaps of innuendo, was largely ignoredits circulation is only about 10,000  until the Wall Street Journal picked up on one bit of their litany: that “George Soros” funded the survey. “The Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers,” said the January 9, 2008, editorial (titled “The Lancet’s Political Hit”) and concluded: “the Lancet study could hardly be more unreliable.” The editorial created sensation in the right-wing blogosphere and in several allied news outlets.

Let me convey what I thought was a simple and unremarkable fact I told Munro in an interview in November and one of the Lancet authors emailed Cannon the details of how the survey was funded. My center at MIT used internal funds to underwrite the survey. More than six months after the survey was commissioned, the Open Society Institute, the charitable foundation begun by Soros, provided a grant to support public education efforts of the issue. We used that to pay for some travel for lectures, a web site, and so on.

OSI, much less Soros himself (who likely was not even aware of this small grant), had nothing to do with the origination, conduct, or results of the survey. The researchers and authors did not know OSI, among other donors, had contributed. And we had hoped the survey’s findings would appear earlier in the year but were impeded by the violence in Iraq. All of this was told repeatedly to Munro and Cannon, but they choose to falsify the story. Charges of political timing were especially ludicrous, because we started more than a year before the 2006 election and tried to do the survey as quickly as possible. It was published when the data were ready.

The New York Post and the Sunday Times of London, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, followed the WSJ editorial and trumpeted the Soros connection and the supposed “fraud” which Munro and Cannon hinted. “SOROS IRAQ DEATH STORY WAS A SHAM” was a headline in the Post, which was followed by a story in which scarcely anything stated was true.

The charges of “fraud” that were also central to the National Journal piece were based on distortions or ignorance of statistical method, such as random sampling and sample size, or speculations about Iraqi field researchers fabricating data. Nothing close to proof of misdeeds was ever offered.

The two principal authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, parried the fraud charges effectively on their web site and in letters to the editors, but of course these are rarely noticed as much as the original charges. Those charges were wholly speculative and at times based on small irregularities in the collection of data, hardly a crime in the midst of the bloodiest period of the war. For example, some death certificates were not collected from respondents; about 80 percent of the time they were. (In the Iraqi MoH survey, death certificates were never collected, making their claims about violence v. nonviolent causes unconfirmable.)

In any case, the many peer reviews of The Lancet article, including one by a special committee of the World Health Organization, gave the survey methods and operations passing grades.

Munro then went on the Glenn Beck program and suggested the Iraqi researchers were unreliable (“without U.S. supervision”) and that the Lancet authors “made it clear they wanted this study published before the election.” Both of those assertions are untrue. Beck then repeated these allegations on his radio program, and added that there was no peer review of the fatality figures, another falsehood, and “we’re getting it jammed down our throat by people who are undercover who are pulling purse strings, who are manipulating the news.”

The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated “without U.S. supervision” and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta “said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey,” which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of religious prejudice.

Munro had also ignored the corroborating evidence I sent him, the 4.5 million displaced (suggesting hundreds of thousands of fatalities, drawing on the ratio of all other wars); estimates of new widows (500,000 from the war); and the other surveys done in Iraq suggesting enormous numbers of casualties (ABC/USA Today poll of March 2007, showing roughly 53% physically harmed by war). When I mentioned these things to him on the telephone, he literally screamed that such data didn’t matter, that the Lancet probe was “a hoax.” Lancet article authors also cite several cases where they were misquoted. The National Journal’s editors have been informed of their reporters’ misconduct and errors, and have not responded.

So the smear is complete  a “political hit” by the “anti-Bush billionaire,” complicity by anti-war academics, fraud by Muslims devoted to Allah  and repeated over and over in the right-wing media. Little has of this has appeared in the legitimate news media, apart from right-wing columnists like Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.

One might expect that such nonsense is obvious to neutral observers, but it constitutes a kind of harassment that scholars must fend off, diverting from more important work. Gilbert Burnham, the lead author on the Lancet article, runs health clinics in Afghanistan and East Africa, and is spending inordinate amounts of time responding to the attacks. Les Roberts, a coauthor, and I have both had colleagues at our universities called by Munro to ask if they would punish us for fraud. The OSI people have also been writing letters to set the record straight. Most important, Riyadh Lafta, who has been threatened before, may be in more danger due to these attacks.

As to the issue of the human cost of the war, even the legitimate press that has avoided this kerfuffle might be intimidated from taking on the issue in depth. The fact that the National Journal hatchet job and the MoH survey appeared within days of each other sent a message to editors around the United States  one survey is “discredited” and one is legitimate. The treatment of the MoH survey that week often noted its death-by-violence number was one-fourth of the Lancet figure  forgetting, again, that total war-related mortality were much closer in both, and congruent with other surveys. The New York Times did run an editorial in early February about the dead in Iraq  the 124 journalists killed in the war.

The topic of the war’s exceptional human costs, now inflamed by these calumnies, appears to be too hot to handle. Even with all this fuss in January, no explorations of the Iraqi mortality from the war have appeared in the major dailies. No editorials, no examination of the methods (or the danger and difficulty of collecting data), no sense that the scale of killing might affect the American position, or might shed some light on U.S. war strategy, or might point to honorable exits and reconstruction obligations. Remarkably, no curiosity at all about the dead of Iraq, and what they can tell us.

The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful.

The [US occupation] military has said civilian deaths from sectarian violence have fallen more than 55% since [US] President Bush sent an additional 28,500 troops to Iraq this year, but it does not provide specific numbers.

According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million.

ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?”

Based on Iraq’s estimated number of households  4,050,597  it said the 1.2 million figure was reasonable.

There was no way to verify the number, because the [US installed] government does not provide a full count of civilian deaths.

According to its findings, nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war-related violence, and 22% of households nationwide had suffered at least one death.

It said 48% of the victims were shot to death and 20% died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.

The survey was conducted last month.

It was the highest estimate given so far of civilian deaths in Iraq. Last year, a study in the medical journal Lancet put the number at 654,965, which Iraq’s government has dismissed as “ridiculous.”

In its latest salvo at Iran, the U.S. military accused the Islamic Republic of providing the 240-millimeter rocket that earlier this week slammed into Camp Victory, the sprawling base that houses the U.S. Army headquarters.

The attack on the base near Baghdad’s airport injured 11 soldiers and killed one “third-country national.”

At a news conference, a military spokesman, Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, displayed a chunk of metal that he said had come from the rocket.

Asked how he could be sure it was of Iranian origin, Bergner said its color and markings were unique to rockets from Iran.

The United States accuses Iran’s Shiite leaders of providing weapons, training and other assistance to Shiite militias fighting U.S. forces in Iraq. Iran denies the accusation.

Deletions from article by TheWE.cc regarding four Sadr City deaths, due to causation of deaths not known but assumed by L.A. Times, therefore regarded as furthering US military propaganda.

[ ] inserted by TheWE.cc

Images inserted by TheWE.cc

Man killed by US attack

Loved ones grieve for those killed by US occupation troops

(left)

More than 4 million displaced people are now in Iraq, Syria, and surrounding countries.

From ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million ( more than one million ).

ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?”

Based on Iraq’s estimated number of households  4,050,597  it said the 1.2 million figure was reasonable.

(right)

Loved ones grieve beside the coffins of their relatives killed by U.S. occupation forces.

“Generally in wars, total casualties, which include wounded, crippled, and lost, are many times the number killed, often as high as ten times.

So while Americans, thirty years later, still weep at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington  a monument representing about sixty thousand deaths over ten years of war  they have inflicted on Iraq, in just three weeks, that same proportionate loss  all of them civilians.

With Iraq‘s population being less than ten percent that of the United States, such losses must be multiplied by ten to get some feel for their impact on the society.

Is this how a great power behaves in the early part of the 21st century?

Especially a power that enjoys reminding us at every opportunity  I suppose because it is so easy for the rest of the world, just watching its actions, to forget  that America stands for human rights and democratic principles?”

John Chuckman

US military attack, July 2007

Al-Maamel, Iraq

An Iraq boy inspects a burned vehicle following a US military raid on Baghdad's Al-Maamel district.

Photo: AFP/Wissam al-Okaili

Weep for loved one killed in US military raid, July 2007

Al-Maamel, Iraq

Iraq village people weeps during the funeral of their relative and loved one who was killed during an overnight US military raid on Baghdad's southeastern Al-Maamel district.

Photo: AFP/Wissam al-Okaili

Occupying US forces

US taxpayer paid

(left)

Occupying US forces drive their Humvee past a pool of blood at the site where two car bombs attacking US puppet régime Iraq government convoys went off near the ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, north east of Baghdad, October 11, 2006.

The somber story of what happened in Iraq between the fall of Saddam and now is told by 'Frontline' as it examines 'The Lost Year in Iraq,' premiering at 9 p.m. Tuesday, October 18, 2006 on US PBS channel.

(right)

Occupying US troops in the Iraq northern city of Mosul, July 30, 2006.

US and US controlled Iraqi forces say they killed 30 Iraq resistance fighters during a fierce street battle in the southern city of Diwaniyah in which a US main battle tank was severely damaged, October 11, 2006

Iraq resistance deny that 30 of their fighters were killed saying one man was injured.

Iraq resistance militia fired a mortar round into a US military base in Baghdad, Oct. 11, 2006, triggering a thunderous series of explosions that destroyed an ammunition dump and rocked the entire city.

Over 1,000 Iraqis are fleeing their homes each day because of rampant violence, and revenge killings inspired by US occupation for oil forces.

The refugee situation is 'totally out of control', the U.N.'s top humanitarian official said Wednesday, October 12, 2006.

Photos: AFP/Ali al-Saadi, Khaled al-Mousily/Reuters

Middle East

Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says

Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press

A boy at his father’s coffin in Baghdad yesterday.
Death rates were higher outside the capital, the study said.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: October 11, 2006

BAGHDAD, Oct. 10  A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.

The study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving the sectarian killings.

In the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry  the two main sources of information for civilian deaths  from releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government is allowed to release figures. It has not provided statistics for September, though a spokesman said Tuesday that it would.

The American military has disputed the Iraqi figures, saying that they are far higher than the actual number of deaths from the insurgency and sectarian violence, in part because they include natural deaths and deaths from ordinary crime, like domestic violence.

But the military has not released figures of its own, giving only percentage comparisons. For example, it cited a 46 percent drop in the murder rate in Baghdad in August from July as evidence of the success of its recent sweeps. At a briefing on Monday, the military’s spokesman declined to characterize the change for September.

The military has released rough counts of average numbers of Iraqis killed and wounded in a quarterly accounting report mandated by Congress. In the report, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” daily averages of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police officers rose from 26 a day in 2004 to almost 120 a day in August 2006.

The study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo. It sought to measure the number of deaths that occurred as a result of the war.

It argues that absolute numbers of dead, like morgue figures, could not give a full picture of the “burden of conflict on an entire population,” because they were often incomplete.

The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.

Gunshots were the largest cause of death, the study said, at 56 percent of all violent deaths, while car bombs accounted for about 13 percent. Deaths caused by the American military declined as an overall percentage from March 2003 to June 2006.

Violent deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a matter of spotty statistical history. Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds that it caused were never counted.

While the near collapse of the Iraqi state makes precise record-keeping difficult, authorities have made considerable progress toward tracking death figures. In 2004, when the Johns Hopkins study was first released, authorities were still compiling deaths on an ad hoc basis. But by this year, they were being provided regularly.

Iraqi authorities say morgue counts are more accurate than is generally thought. Iraqis prefer to bury their dead immediately, and hurry bodies of loved ones to plots near mosques or, in the case of Shiites, in sacred burial sites. Even so, they have strong incentives to register the death with a central morgue or hospital in order to obtain a death certificate, required at highway checkpoints, by cemetery workers, and for government pensions. Death certificates are counted in the statistics kept by morgues around the country.

The most recent United Nations figure, 3,009 Iraqis killed in violence across the country in August, was compiled by statistics from Baghdad’s central morgue, and from hospitals and morgues countrywide. It assumes a daily rate of about 97.

The figure is not exhaustive. A police official at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he had seen nationwide counts provided to the hospital that indicated as many as 200 people a day were dying.

Gilbert Burnham, the principle author of the study, said the figures showed an increase of deaths over time that was similar to that of another civilian casualty project, Iraq Body Count, which collates deaths reported in the news media, and even to that of the military. But even Iraq Body Count puts the maximum number of deaths at just short of 49,000.

As far as skepticism about the death count, he said that counts made by journalists and others focused disproportionately on Baghdad, and that death rates were higher elsewhere.

“We found deaths all over the country,” he said. Baghdad was an area of medium violence in the country, he said. The provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin, north of Baghdad, and Anbar to the west, all had higher death rates than the capital.

Statistics experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate.

Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”

But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed  547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion  was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.

Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Injured Iraq people

January 5, 2010

Injured Iraq people arrive at the Queen Alia airport in Amman January 5, 2010.

With the support of the Jordanian government, the Royal Jordanian Airline flew 25 Iraqis, injured in bomb attacks, to be treated at the Queen Alia medical centre in Jordan.

Seven years after the US under Bush first bombed Iraq into submission and then occupied the country, Iraq is still occupied by the US, now under Obama, in 2010.

It is unknown how many US black operations special forces, or US contractors, are involved in the bomb attack injuries.

Photo: REUTERS/Ali Jarekji

December 27, 2009

A boy wears a shirt depicting the revered Shiite saint, Imam Hussein, is treated for wounds suffered in a bombing at a hospital in Kirkuk, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, December 27, 2009.

Seven years after the US under Bush first bombed Iraq into submission and then occupied the country, Iraq is still occupied by the US, now under Obama, in 2010.

It is unknown if US black operations special forces, or US contractors, are involved in the bomb attack injury.

Photo: AP/Emad Matti

It boggles my mind how the U.S. share of this slaughter could have been kept out of the report offered in the New York Times or USA Today.

The Times did run some pie charts that showed in a dark shade the share of deaths caused by U.S. forces, but because no numbers or percentages were provided, and because no such figures appeared in the accompanying story, the impact was greatly diminished.

What made the Times article, which ran on an inside page, particularly offensive, was a page-one story that ran on the same day, headlined "3rd Iraq Death Has One town Shaken to Core."

This piece looked in detail about how the deaths in Iraq of three servicemen from the New York hamlet of Highland, had caused such widespread grief and anguish in a small American town.

How on earth could editors give that story  excellent and poignant as it was in its own right  such prominence while burying a report about the wholesale slaughter of a people by U.S. forces?

Don't the editors realize that every one of those Iraqi deaths was producing the same kind of grief and anger in towns and villages across Iraq?

Dave Lindorff http://www.uruknet.info October 11, 2006

Kewe note: All is the fruit of the US invasion. Nothing can be excused.

War Crimes Report Shows US Violations of International Law and Demands Prosecution of US Military and Civilian Leaders

The violence of the Iraq War, the chaos that has come to Iraq, can be traced directly to the illegality of the invasion and occupation of that country and the illegality of the tactics and weapons being used to maintain the occupation. U.S. War Crimes in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability documents these violations and calls on us all to demand investigation and prosecution of violations of international law by military and civilian leaders.

The report was prepared by Consumers for Peace.org with the advice of Karen Parker, noted lawyer in human rights and humanitarian law. Ms. Parker is President of the San-Francisco-based Association of Humanitarian Lawyers ( www.humanlaw.org ) and Chief Delegate to the United Nations for the Los Angeles-based International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project (IED/AHL), an accredited non-governmental organization on the U.N. Secretary-General's list.

Dahr Jamail, noted independent journalist who spent more than eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, writes the following about the report:

I cannot endorse strongly enough this report prepared by Karen Parker regarding U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

Having witnessed much of what is so well documented in this report, it is a clear and encompassing indictment of the Bush Administration for the war crimes they are directly responsible for in Iraq.

Until evidence such as this begins to see the light of day in a court of law and the perpetrators brought to justice, the world remains unsafe and unstable from an administration determined to rule the world. After witnessing what they are capable of in Iraq, I have no doubt these people will not stop in their quest for world domination.?

Instead, they must be stopped.

And the only way to do that is bring the guilty to justice. This document will help achieve that goal.

Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Non-Violence, three-time nominee for the Noble Peace Prize, who has visited Iraq 28 times in the last 15 years, writes of the report:

After spending four days in the fortified and secure Green Zone, in Iraq, during September 06, former Secretary of State James Baker III assured that the investigative panel he led had not spent any time wringing our hands over what mistakes might or might not have been created in the past.

(NYT, September 20, 2006).

The Consumers for Peace report on war crimes committed in Iraq helps us understand our responsibility not to wring our hands but rather to demand accountability from elected representatives by delivering this report to them and to local media. How many people killed?

How many families torn apart? How many homes destroyed?

How many livelihoods gone?

How many lives ruined?

How many cities sacrificed?

We bear responsibility to end the war in Iraq, insist on just reparations for suffering caused, and promote careful, legal scrutiny of the crimes committed.

This report beckons all who read it to stop collaborating with illegal, immoral warmongers who recklessly afflict Iraq.

The invasion and occupation have stained the concepts of democracy, freedom and liberty; and disgraced the good name of the people of both the United States of America and Great Britain.

As a journalist who has investigated the roots of this war, and the on-going horror of what is happening in Iraq, I fully commend this report to readers.

It is an important reminder of the blood which is on the hands of our leaders, and the shame that the governments of the UK and the USA have brought to the British and American people by perpetrating a criminal war in our name."

An Iraqi humanitarian organization that follows the human rights situation in the country announced on Monday morning that the number of Iraqis killed since the US occupation of Iraq has now topped 128,000.

Dr. Hatim al-‘Alwani, Chairman of the ‘Iraqiyun humanitarian organization in Baghdad told the correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam that everyone who has been killed since the US invasion must be seen as victims of that invasion.

Al-‘Alawani said that 55 percent of those killed have been women and children aged 12 and under.

Asked how these data were obtained, Dr al-‘Alwani said that relatives and families of victims supplied information, as did Iraqi hospitals in all the country’s provinces.

Not included in count

It should be noted that the figure of 128,000 quoted by “al-‘Iraqiyun” only includes those whose relatives have been informed of their deaths. Those who were abducted or assassinated and not heard from  and there are many such cases  were not included in the count.

The correspondent noted that the figure of 128,000 agrees with what Mafkarat al-Islam’s correspondents have been witnessing and reporting from the various cities in which they work, in particular as a result of the very bloody US assaults on al-Fallujah and al-Qa’im.

Occupying US forces protect the puppet régime government in this heavily fortified conclave.

(right)

Iraq people wheel a body into the morgue in Baghdad.

Iraq resistance militia fired a mortar round into a US military base in Baghdad, triggering a thunderous series of explosions that destroyed an ammunition dump and rocked the entire city.

Photos: AFP/Wissam Al-Okaili, Graphic/Reuters

Thursday, 28 October, 2004

Iraqi people are now 58 times more likely to die a violent death

Iraq death toll 'soared post-war'

Poor planning, air strikes by coalition forces and a "climate of violence" have led to more than 100,000 extra deaths in Iraq, scientists say.

A study published by the Lancet claims the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion.

It condemns the coalition's planning on public health as "grievously in error".

The Lancet admits the research is based on a small sample - under 1,000 homes - but says the findings are "convincing".

Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US city of Baltimore gathered data on births and deaths since January 2002 from 33 clusters of 30 households each across Iraq.

Air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths

Dr Les Roberts

They found the relative risk of death was one-and-a-half
times higher for Iraqi civilians after the 2003 invasion than in the preceding 15 months.

That figure jumps to two-and-a-half times higher if data from Falluja - the scene of repeated heavy fighting - is included.

Before the invasion, most people died as a result of heart attack, stroke and chronic illness, the report says, whereas after the invasion, "violence was the primary cause of death."

Women and children are reportedly the biggest casualties of air strikes

Violent deaths were mainly attributed to coalition forces - and most individuals reportedly killed were women and children.

Dr Les Roberts, who led the study, said: "Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths."

He said his team's work proved it was possible to compile data on public health "even during periods of extreme violence".

The sample included randomly selected households in Baghdad, Basra, Arbil, Najaf and Karbala, as well as Falluja.

"With the admitted benefit of hindsight and from a purely public health perspective, it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error."

He went on: "Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths not fewer. This political and military failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants."

Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths not fewer

Lancet editor Richard Horton

Lancet editor Richard Horton said:
He urges the coalition forces to rethink their strategy to "prevent further unnecessary human casualties".

"For the sake of a country in crisis and for a people under daily threat of violence, the evidence we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts," he said.

LONDON  Researchers have estimated that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis  many of them women and children  died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq than would have been expected otherwise, based on the death rate before the war.

Writing in the British-based medical journal The Lancet, the American and Iraqi researchers concluded that violence accounted for most of the extra deaths and that airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition were a major factor.

There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Thursday, 1,106 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department.

The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.

The report was released just days before the U.S. presidential election, and the lead researcher said he wanted it that way. The Lancet routinely publishes papers on the Web before they appear in print, particularly if it considers the findings of urgent public health interest.

Those reports then appear later in the print issue of the journal.

The journal's spokesmen said they were uncertain which print issue the Iraqi report would appear in and said it was too late to make Friday's issue, and possibly too late for the Nov. 5 edition.

Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article's timing was up to him.

"I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election," Roberts told The Associated Press.

"My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.

"I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives," Roberts said. "As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this."

Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved with the research, said the approach the scientists took is a reasonable one to investigate the Iraq death toll.

However, it's possible that they may have zoned in on hotspots that might not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, said Peto, a professor of medical statistics at Oxford University in England.

Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote in an editorial accompanying the survey that more household clusters would have improved the precision of the report, "but at an enormous and unacceptable risk to the team of interviewers."

"This remarkable piece of work represents the efforts of a courageous team of scientists," he wrote.

To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly across the country in September, randomly selecting clusters of 30 households to sample. Of the 988 households visited, 808, consisting of 7,868 people, agreed to participate. Each household was asked how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002.

The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before the invasion with those that occurred during the 18 months after the attack and adjusted those numbers to account for the different time periods.

Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

The investigators worked in teams of three. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers were doctors and all six were fluent in English and Arabic.

In the households reporting deaths, the person who died had to be living there at the time of the death and for more than two months before to be counted. In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times.

There were 46 deaths in the surveyed households before the war. After the invasion, there were 142 deaths.

That is an increase from 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 12.3 per 1,000 people per year  more than double.

However, more than a third of the post-invasion deaths were reported in one cluster of households in the city Fallujah, where fighting has been most intense recently.

Because the fighting was so severe there, the numbers from that location may have exaggerated the overall picture.

When the researchers recalculated the effect of the war without the statistics from Fallujah, the deaths end up at 7.9 per 1,000 people per year  still 1.5 times higher than before the war.

Even with Fallujah factored out, the survey "indicates that the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is more likely than not about 100,000 people, and may be much higher," the report said.

The most common causes of death before the invasion of Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases. However, after the invasion, violence was recorded as the primary cause of death and was mainly attributed to coalition forces  with about 95 percent of those deaths caused by bombs or fire from helicopter gunships.

Violent deaths  defined as those brought about by the intentional act of others  were reported in 15 of the 33 clusters. The chances of a violent death were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it, the researchers said.

Twelve of the 73 violent deaths were not attributed to coalition forces. The researchers said 28 children were killed by coalition forces in the survey households. Infant mortality rose from 29 deaths per 1,000 live births before the war to 57 deaths per 1,000 afterward.

The researchers estimated the nationwide death toll due to the conflict by subtracting the preinvasion death rate from the post-invasion death rate and multiplying that number by the estimated population of Iraq  24.4 million at the start of the war. Then that number was converted to a total number of deaths by dividing by 1,000 and adjusting for the 18 months since the invasion.

"We estimate that there were 98,000 extra deaths during the postwar period in the 97 percent of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Fallujah," the researchers said in the journal.

"This isn't about individual soldiers doing bad things. This appears to be a problem with the approach to occupation in Iraq," Roberts said.

The researchers called for further confirmation by an independent body such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, or the World Health Organization.

The study was funded by the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins University and by the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, Switzerland, a research project based at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

October 11, 2006

October 11, 2006

(left)

Mushroom like cloud is seen over Baghdad as huge explosions rocked the Iraq capital early Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006.

Iraq resistance militia fired a mortar round into a US military base in Baghdad

The fire erupted at the ammunition depot on the occupying U.S. base in southern Baghdad setting off a series of explosions from detonating tank and artillery shells that shook buildings miles away.

(right)

Mushroom like cloud is seen over Baghdad as huge explosions rocked the Iraq capital early Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006.

Photos: AP/Dusan Vranic, Graphic/Reuters

Survey claims 37,000 Iraqi civilians killed in first seven months of war

By James Conachy5 August 2004

An Iraqi political organization, the People’s Kifah or Struggle Against Hegemony, told the Arab network Al Jazeera on the weekend that it had documented more than 37,000 civilian deaths in Iraq in the seven months from the start of the US war on March 20,2003, through October 2003.

A spokesman for the People’s Kifah, Muhammad al-Ubaidi, told Al Jazeera they were “100percent sure” the estimate was correct.

The data was gathered during September and October 2003, when the organization undertook a nationwide survey “involving hundreds of Iraqi activists and academics.”

Ubaidi stated: “For the collation of our statistics we visited the most remote villages, spoke and coordinated with grave-diggers across Iraq, obtained information from hospitals and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US fire.”

The People’s Kifah claims it halted the survey under duress, after one of the group’s workers, Ramzi Musa Ahmad, was seized by Kurdish militiamen last October and handed over to US troops.

He has been missing ever since.

According to the statements of the organization, the figure of 37,000 does not include the casualties suffered by Iraqi military and paramilitary forces.

The estimates of Iraqi military deaths during the invasion range from approximately 10, 000 to as many as 45,000.

As the study concluded last October, it also does not include the large numbers of civilian casualties inflicted by the US military in April and May, during its operations to crush the Iraqi uprising in Fallujah and Baghdad and across southern Iraq.

Thus far, only limited details of the survey have been released, and its methodology does not appear to have been subjected to independent scrutiny.

It warrants attention, however, because no official survey into the number of civilian casualties has been carried out in Iraq since the occupation began.

The US military refuses to make public its own estimate of how many Iraqi civilians it killed during the invasion. Last December, the head of the statistics department of the Iraqi health ministry alleged a study it was conducting was shut down on the orders of the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

At the time, both the CPA and the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council denied any survey was being conducted.

Though there are no official figures on casualties, what is known is that the US military unleashed massive firepower during the invasion of Iraq.

The ongoing occupation has been marked by the systematic repression of the Iraqi people in an effort to force them to bow down to the neo-colonial US control of the country and its resources.

According to figures released last year by the US military, some 800 cruise missiles, more than 18,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles, and some 9,000 “dumb” bombs were unleashed on Iraq during the invasion.

At least 1,200 cluster bombs were dropped

At least 1,200 cluster bombs were dropped, each releasing dozens of small grenade-like bomblets.

A-10 “Warthog” ground-support aircraft fired an estimated 300,000 rounds from their 30 mm cannons  many of which are believed to have been manufactured from depleted uranium (DU).

Tens of thousands of tank and ground artillery rounds, including DU rounds, and vast numbers of machine-gun and small-arms munitions were also expended.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved 50 air strikes that US military planners had estimated in advance would kill 30 or more civilians.

Fifty strikes were also launched to kill “high-value” Iraqi military and political leaders, mostly in Baghdad, before which no estimate was even made of likely civilian deaths.

None of them hit their intended targets, and the few that have been investigated all resulted in civilian losses.

The People’s Kifah survey claims to have documented 6,103 civilian deaths in Baghdad province from the beginning of the war through October.

Large numbers of civilians killed during US tank assaults into city

Iraq’s capital suffered the heaviest aerial bombardment by American and allied aircraft, and large numbers of civilians were killed during the US tank assaults into the city from April 3 to April9.

Between May and October2003, Human Rights Watch collected what it called credible reports of 94 civilian deaths in Baghdad at the hands of American troops.

These included people gunned down in their cars as they approached checkpoints, shot during raids, or hit by indiscriminate US fire in the street.

In the province of Basra, which has been under British control since the end of the war, the survey claims to have documented 6,734 civilian deaths.

The city of Basra, Iraq’s second largest, was subjected to a fierce bombardment and siege by US and British troops in the first week of the war.

Three hospitals in the city recorded 413 deaths during the invasion, but this figure did not include those who did not die in hospital or who were not taken to hospital morgues.

In Babil province 3,552 civilians killed

In Babil province, of which Hilla is the capital, the survey claims 3,552 civilians were killed.

During the invasion, an International Red Cross representative, Roland Hugenin, told journalists from Hilla hospital that “there has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla.

We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children.”

The survey claims 3,581 civilians died in the province of Nasiriya  another scene of intense fighting during the invasion.

It claims more than 2,000 civilian deaths in other southern provinces such as Misan, Karbala and Wasit; the northern province of Mosul; and the western province of al-Anbar, which includes the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.

No figures were reportedly gathered in the three predominantly Kurdish northern provinces of the country.

The figure of 37,000 deaths is far higher than the estimate of civilian casualties arrived at by relying upon media accounts.

As of August 4, the Iraq Body Count web site (www.iraqbodycount.net) had data-base reports that show a minimum of 11,429, and a maximum of 13,398 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq since March 20,2003.

A disclaimer on the site reads, however: “We are not a news organization ourselves and like everyone else can only base our information on what has been reported so far.

What we are attempting to provide is a credible compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources.

Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths  which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported.

It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.

That is the sad nature of war” (emphasis in the original).

The true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties is therefore likely to be closer to that arrived at by the People’s Kifah survey.

The scale of the death and destruction resulting from the US invasion of Iraq underscores the criminality of those responsible for planning and organizing the war, and those advocating the continuation of the occupation.

See Also: US uses cluster bombs to spread death and destruction in Iraq
[5 April 2003]

US rampage through Baghdad kills thousands
[7 April 2003]

Copyright 1998-2004World Socialist Web SiteAll rights reserved

US occupying Apache helicopters

Baquba, Iraq

US patrol targeted

(left)

Apache helicopters flying over Baghdad.

Iraq resistance militia fired a mortar round into a US military base in Baghdad

The fire erupted at the ammunition depot on the occupying U.S. base in southern Baghdad setting off a series of explosions from detonating tank and artillery shells that shook buildings miles away.

Over 1,000 Iraqis are fleeing their homes each day because of rampant violence, and revenge killings inspired by US occupation for oil forces.

The refugee situation is 'totally out of control', the U.N.'s top humanitarian official said Wednesday, October 12, 2006.

(right)

MFire flames rise from the wreckage of a burning car after a US patrol was targeted by a car bomb in the city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad.

US and US controlled Iraqi forces say they killed 30 Iraq resistance fighters during a fierce street battle in the southern city of Diwaniyah in which a US main battle tank was severely damaged.

Iraq resistance deny that 30 of their fighters were killed saying one man was injured.

Photos: AFP/Marwan Naamani, AFP

BANALITY, BOMBAST, AND BLOOD

John ChuckmanJune 3, 2003

Generally in wars, total casualties, which include wounded, crippled, and lost, are many times the number killed, often as high as ten times.

I do not know what the appropriate ratio is for Iraq, but it's not hard to see that the United States killed and hurt a great many innocent people in a few weeks of "precision" war.

Of military losses, poor boys drafted to defend their homes, we as yet have no good estimate.

In the first Gulf War, between sixty and one hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers were slaughtered.

With Iraq's population being less than ten percent that of the United States, such losses must be multiplied by ten to get some feel for their impact on the society.

So while Americans, thirty years later, still weep at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington  a monument representing about sixty thousand deaths over ten years of war  they have inflicted on Iraq, in just three weeks, that same proportionate loss  all of them civilians.

The one-sided slaughter of soldiers in the first Gulf War represented the equivalent of the U.S. having sustained between half a million and a million deaths just over a decade ago.

No society recovers easily from such losses of its youth.

Ms. Ruzicka runs a non-profit organization that works to make accurate counts of a war's civilian dead.

Ms. Ruzicka says that between five and ten thousand civilians were killed.

In a real war, a war in which most people agree there is some powerful motivating cause, the fate of an individual soldier becomes almost unimportant.

Soldiers in real wars are reduced to just about the status of soldier-ants in a war between two ant-nests.

But the public can be mercurial when it comes to invasions with flimsy excuses and gas-bag ideology.

Public support can shift quickly or melt away entirely, so a little juicing-up may be prescribed.

Besides, when there is almost no real news being reported, as was true in America for Iraq, you need a little something to satisfy the chips-and-television crowd anxious to be informed from their couches.

Since America's modern warriors are limited to follow-up after missiles and bombs have reduced everything to a vision of hell, much of the touching stuff that once inspired the home front is missing.

There are no more pitiful and tragic images of young Americans falling in what seems a worthy cause.

So the Pentagon's prisoner-liberation simulation, like its staged statue-toppling in Baghdad, so suggestive of news photos at end of World War Two, served several purposes.

Is this how a great power behaves in the early part of the 21st century?

Especially a power that enjoys reminding us at every opportunity  I suppose because it is so easy for the rest of the world, just watching its actions, to forget  that America stands for human rights and democratic principles?

Yes, unfortunately, that is exactly how it behaves.

Only, the complete picture is bleaker still.

Mr. Bush at the G-8 summit in Evian, France  a summit he considered not even attending and at which, in any event, he cut short his stay  made an effort at grand-poohbah statesman with, "We can have disagreements, but that doesn't mean we have to be disagreeable," a lifelessly trite line, but one certainly ranking at the peak of this President's eloquence.

Just a few days before (May 30), Bush abandoned the session with reporters that customarily precedes a G-8 summit, perhaps reflecting advisors' concerns that he would blow it with his anger when questioned about recent events.

He left the session for his tactful National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, to blow.

On the subject of Canada, Ms. Rice gave us, "I think there was disappointment in the United States that a friend like Canada was unable to support the United States in what we considered to be an extremely important issue for our security [Emphasis is mine]."

Does Ms. Rice read the newspaper?

Her words about security come within days of reports of an interview with the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz in which he admits the business about weapons was an excuse for invading Iraq.

His admission only punctuated weeks of reports about American forces not finding anything remotely suspicious and America's hack chorus of national columnists swelling their breasts to a theme about weapons not being important after all.

Canada has never stinted in helping Americans.

Canada is the kind of neighbor any sensible people would want.

But helping a scheme for "regime change" in someone else's country, unsupported by international law, is not quite the same thing as helping Americans.

Canada was never called a poor friend for not helping in the many shadowy "regime changes" the United States has conducted across the Caribbean and Latin America.

Canada's values and interests do not lie that way.

Why was the situation suddenly so different for an unthreatening small country on the other side of the planet?

The tough answer is that the United States government felt alone and naked in what it was doing over Iraq.

It desperately sought international approval, which it did not get, leaving the harsh ideologues in the White House both embarrassed and angry at being embarrassed.

Ms. Rice went on to say differences with Canada had put bilateral relations through "some difficult times," and "that disappointment will, of course, not go [away] easily.

It will take some time, because when friends are in a position where we say our security's at stake, we would have thought, as we got from many of our friends, that the answer would have been, 'Well, how can we help?' "

There were times when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than perhaps Saddam Hussein," Ms. Rice said

Does any honest person reading her words find them in keeping with Bush's G-8 stuff about "not being disagreeable"?

They are clearly disagreeable, provocative, and even petty.

But Ms. Rice went even further concerning Germany, "I can't answer the question of whether personal relations between the President and the Chancellor will ever be the same. We will have to see."

As for France, "there were times when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than perhaps Saddam Hussein," Ms. Rice said.

Well, to put it also very bluntly, American power, when it is used to bully others, in fact is more dangerous, far more dangerous, than Saddam Hussein ever was.

"We have been allies in great struggles in world wars," Ms. Rice said of the French.

"The United States gave its blood to liberate France."

The United States gave its blood to defeat rivals Germany and Japan.

Liberating countries like France was incidental, although the French have always scrupulously, respectfully maintained America's battlefield cemeteries and commemorated America's efforts as few others do.

The historical fact is President Roosevelt considered governing postwar France in a very high-handed manner.

He pretty much detested De Gaulle, and France's empire was something the Roosevelt people never stopped sneering at and preaching about while merrily working to build one of their own.

The situation was far murkier and less heroic than Ms. Rice would have you understand, but her purpose was to put another country on the defensive, not to teach history.

Are the world's statesmen so dense they do not understand true danger when they see it?

Do they deliberately embrace evil?

Of course not.

Then, why Ms. Rice's language if the need for invading Iraq was clear?

Precisely because the need was not clear, and it has only become even less clear now.

Manipulative language here is a substitute for thought  we are given a form of aggressive marketing rather than an honest product  a practice to which this administration is addicted.

Just a week before the G-8 summit, another Bush-administration bully, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, gave us his version of "not being disagreeable."

Rumsfeld informed the French air force that it would not be welcome at two upcoming international exercises.

Rumsfeld's version of "not being disagreeable" included declaring that the United States would heavily cut its involvement with the Paris Air Show, traditionally the world's most important show for aviation technology.

As a Pentagon official so agreeably put it, "With troops eating military rations in the dust in Iraq, it's not appropriate for officers to be wined and dined in Paris."

Doesn't that sound reasonable?

So, do you think they've stopped wining and dining in expensive Georgetown restaurants over all the fat new Pentagon contracts being handed out these days?

Or do they just quietly put aside that disagreeable stuff about dust and rations on such happy occasions?

Do you think they served military freeze-dried rations at the President's recent $18-million dollar fundraiser?

America's top diplomat, that disappointing baritone of dissimulation, Colin Powell, has gone around for weeks uttering threats and slights towards France.

A couple of weeks ago, he said the United States would reconsider its links with France following disagreement over Iraq.

Does that sound anything like being "not disagreeable"?

On CBC Radio some weeks ago, there was a fascinating little story.

There is a manufacturer in Quebec who actually makes some of the fancy cowboy boots beloved in Texas.

During the height of American irritation over Iraq, this boot-maker was asked by his Texas customer to supply a written statement that he did not personally support Canada's policy towards war in Iraq.

Can you imagine an American's furious response at being asked such an inappropriate, private, personal matter in a business transaction?

In effect, he was asked to supply a kind of pledge of allegiance to someone else's foreign policy.

Something corrupt, dirty, and destructive is taking hold of America, choking even ordinary business with the sewerage of ideology.

How does one talk of neighborliness, love of freedom, or democratic-mindedness while behaving like a blackmailer?

Copyright (c) Scoop Media

US occupation for oil military helicopters flying over Iraq flags

Baghdad, July 2007

Two U.S. military occupation for oil helicopters fly over Iraq flags in Baghdad, July 7, 2007.

From the blowing up of bridges to the attempts to split the resistance: what's going on in Iraq?

April 18, 2007

Salah al-Mukhtar was a prominent Baathist in the late Saddam era, serving in diplomatic positions in India, Vietnam and the UN, and although he doesn't have an official position currently, he often comments on the Iraq war from a Baathist perspective.

This article was published on the resistance website albasrah.net April 15, and a commenter suggested this would be a good introduction to a point of view that doesn't get much coverage here in the anglosphere. And it is hard to argue with that.

One of his major points is that it seems to him that at the point when the Americans realized they were in trouble militarily, they came up with the idea of covertly helping the takfiris attack other Iraqis, as a way of helping turn the war against the occupation into an Iraqi-on-Iraqi war. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, this writer implies, without mentioning the name, is a likely a nobody who rose to prominence with covert American aid.

His title is "From the blowing up of bridges to the attempts to split the resistance: what's going on in Iraq?"

Al-Mukhtar begins by talking about the recent blowing up of two major bridges over the Tigris in Baghdad, and the intensified popular sense of foreboding this caused, because it suggests to people the idea of Iraqi partition extending to the heart of Baghdad, and it suggests too the idea that there are some with a strategy of not leaving stone upon stone, and finishing the work of destruction that the Americans began.

The American Mukhabarat has undertaken another project, this one with the clear support of Iran

He then segues to the execution of Saddam and his associates, with its "artificial creation of a sectarian atmosphere", the idea being that these apparently separate events, and many others, are part and parcel of a scheme to foster sectarian warfare, split the resistance, and weaken the country to the point where the occupation can succeed.

The Saddam execution was followed by an attempt by a group in Syria to split the Baath, and American-led persecution of the Party and its members and supporters throughout Iraq. The writer goes on:

And in addition to the attempts to attack the name of the [Baath] Party, the American Mukhabarat has undertaken another project, this one with the clear support of Iran, whether by direct arrangement or by a meeting of the minds, namely the plan to cause fighting between factions of the Iraqi jihad, by encouraging Islamist takfiris within some of the factions to announce their intention to monopolize, from now on, the control of Iraq or at least of the field of jihad, giving the other factions the choice of having their necks cut, or pledging allegiance to them and proceeding under their leadership  and that even though they only represented a small group!

Likewise other members took to applying takfir to the progressive and arabist nationalist factions.

...And they went so far as to kill dozens of military cadres fighting against the occupation from among the Baathists and arabists, for the purpose of igniting a fight among the jihadi factions, serving in this way the primary purpose of America and Iran, namely the division of the Iraqi resistance, because that is the basic prerequisite for turning the American defeat in Iraq into victory.

The writer then explains the meaning of the expression "moles" in organizations like these.

And he says what has been going on is this:

(The Americans) Once they understood that they had well and truly fallen into the Iraqi trap, from which they wouldn't emerge safely unless they could come up with an elaborately thought-out scheme, started putting moles in specific factions, and via these moles they offered the groups generous material and PR support.

This enhanced the credibility of these moles, and raised their profile and role within these factions, and some of them came to have leadership roles within those factions.

Without mentioning names, it is pretty clear he is referring to people like Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a person no one had ever heard of before, who suddenly emerged as the emir of the Islamic State of Iraq.

Overlooking this role of agents, the writer says, would be a fateful error no matter how you look at it. And he asks:

Why is it that there was never, ever, any disclosure of any new American agents after the original disclosure of the roles of the old agents Allawi, Hakim, Chalabi and the others?

Are they the only agents, or are their other agents who are more important because they operate within the national ranks and haven't been exposed yet?

Unknown if the attack was paid and setup by US government special black budget operations

Iraq relatives search for the bodies of their loved ones amidst bodies piled inside a refrigerator truck in Baghdad's impoverished district of Sadr City.

Unknown if the attacks were paid and setup by US government special black budget operations.

US war facilitator Robert Gates flew into Iraq for talks with US occupation for oil commanders on Thursday after unknown bombers killed more than 200 people in a savage blow to the so called 'US-backed security plan'.

Photo: AFP/Ahmad Al-Rubaye

US war machine

US war machine soldiers outside a police station in Narhwan, 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, April 19, 2007.

Photo: AP/Maya Alleruzzo

U.S. occupation for oil Nablus

A US paid Israel soldier fires from behind his armoured vehicle during clashes in the Asker refugee camp in the West Bank town of Nablus.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: AFP/Jaafar Ashtiyeh

U.S. occupation for oil Qalqilya

An Israel occupying soldier takes up position during a demonstration marking Land Day in the West Bank town of Salfit March 31, 2007.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: REUTERS/Abed Omar Qusini

Unknown if the attack was paid and setup by US government special black budget operations

An Iraqi woman mourns the death of her son outside a hospital in the Baghdad district of Sadr City.

Unknown if the attack was paid and setup by US government special black budget operations.

US war facilitator Robert Gates flew into Iraq for talks with US occupation for oil commanders on Thursday after unknown bombers killed more than 200 people in a savage blow to the so called 'US-backed security plan'.

Photo: AFP/Ahmad Al-Rubaye

Paid for by US taxpayer money

An Israel occupying soldier fires during a demonstration marking Land Day in the West Bank town of Salfit March 31, 2007.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: REUTERS/Abed Omar Qusini

As of old...

A Palestinian youth uses a sling against Israeli troops during a demonstration marking Land Day in the West Bank town of Salfit March 31, 2007.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: AP/Mohammed Ballas

Unknown if the attack was paid and setup by US government special black budget operations

An Iraq man mourns over the coffin of a loved one outside the morgue of a hospital in Baghdad's impoverished district of Sadr City.

Unknown if the attack was paid and setup by US government special black budget operations.

US war facilitator Robert Gates flew into Iraq for talks with US occupation for oil commanders on Thursday after unknown bombers killed more than 200 people in a savage blow to the so called 'US-backed security plan'.

Photo: AFP/Ahmad Al-Rubaye

All atrocities committed using US taxpayer money.

Israeli army soldiers search a Palestinian house during a demonstration to mark Land Day in the West Bank village of Kalandia, between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Friday, March 30, 2007.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: AP/Mohammed Ballas

Unknown if the attack was paid and setup by US government special black budget operations

A man stands near burnt vehicles at the scene of a car bomb attack in Baghdad, April 19, 2007.

Unknown if the attack was paid and setup by US government special black budget operations.

US war facilitator Robert Gates flew into Iraq for talks with US occupation for oil commanders on Thursday after unknown bombers killed more than 200 people in a savage blow to the so called 'US-backed security plan'.

Photo: Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters

US occupied al-Shohada

A Palestinian woman is carried away after inhaling tear gas when US Israel troops fired at people in al-Shohada village March 29, 2007.

US Israel troops shot dead a teenager and wounded two other Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, local residents said.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

US occupied al-Shohada

Palestinian boys throw stones at an US Israel army vehicle during clashes with occupation for oil troops in Al-shohada village near the West Bank city of Jenin March 29, 2007.

US paid Israel troops shot dead a teenager after he threw stones.

US occupation for oil soldiers wounded two other Palestinians local residents said.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

US occupied Mothallath

Palestinian relatives of Ahmed Asa'asah, 16, mourn during his funeral at Mothallath near the West Bank city of Jenin March 29, 2007.

US Israel occupation troops shot dead the teenager after he threw stones at soldiers.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

US paid vehicle

US occupied al-Shohada

An armoured vehicle of US Israel during attacks by occupation troops in Al-shohada village near the West Bank city of Jenin March 29, 2007.

US Israel troops shot dead a teenager after he threw stones.

US occupation soldiers wounded two other Palestinians local residents said.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

US occupied Mothallath

Palestinian mourners carry the body of Ahmed Asaesah, 16, during his funeral in the village of Mothallath near the West Bank town of Jenin, Thursday, March 29, 2007.

US Israel occupation troops shot dead the teenager after he threw stones at soldiers.

Land Day commemorates the land Palestinians have owned and worked since before the time of historical records.

In more recent time is commemorates an uprising on March 30, 1976.

Six people were killed when property was annexed in northern Israel to expand Jewish communities.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: AP/Mohammed Ballas

US paid vehicles

US occupied Askar refugee camp

A Palestinian boy between two huge armoured US paid for vehicles throws a stone at Israel troops during an occupation raid in Askar refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus March 29, 2007.

US Israel troops shot dead a teenager after he threw stones.

US occupation soldiers wounded two other Palestinians local residents said.

The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.

More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.

Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

Photo: REUTERS/Abed Omar Qusini

US soldier leg injury

U.S. Sergeant Derek Whitaker, suffering from a leg injury after an attack during his tour of duty in Iraq, receives physiotherapy at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre (LRMC) in Landstuhl near Kaiserslautern, April 19, 2007.

Chief traumatologist of the LRMC, Doctor Stephen Flaherty said that over 3000 casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have received emergency treatment in Landstuhl so far.

Photo: REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

A U.S. Marine Corps CH-46 helicopter.

A British coroner contradicted the U.S. military on Thursday over the cause of a deadly helicopter crash during the invasion of Iraq, the latest ruling to expose discord between the two occupying forces.

Photo: US Government

Carries son

A mother carries the body of her son Montathar Qassim, age 6, victim of a bombing in Baghdad, for the small boy's funeral in Najaf, Iraq, Thursday, April 19, 2007.

The writer then compares the role of moles in the jihadi organizations to that of Iran in the macro picture, in the sense that Iran

...appears with the appearance of opposing America for the good of the cause of Islam and Palestine...

[but] this is in preparation for dividing [Iraqis and Palestinians] and changing the fight from a fight for liberation against America and Israel, into sectarian fights between muslims, instead of focusing all guns on the Zionists and the Americans.

As far as Iraq is concerned, the writer says, the result has been that most attacks carried out by these groups are now against Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni, and not against the occupation forces except peripherally.

America has spent a lot on this war, and that in Afghanistan, but since success would give them control over the world's major oil reserves, and and with it a global dictatorship, the price will have been cheap considering the result.

It would be naive, the writer says, to think that everyone who fights America or Israel in Iraq or in Palestine is necessarily engaged in struggle or jihad.

Because you have to look at the final result, and not at half-way results.

You can't judge military efforts against the occupation except in the light of real aims and real results, and the one necessary condition for victory in Iraq is maintenance of the unity of the resistance, just as the one necessary condition for the occupation to succeed is to split the resistance.

The first observation is that at the same time that the American Mukhabarat toughens its campaign against the Baath by various means...

[including] its extreme efforts to dry up the sources of funding for the Party and its resistance, and its arrest of tens of thousands of its fighters and mujahideen, at the same time it is making life easier in a remarkable way for the sectarian Sunni takfiris, offering them financial and military support, whether directly, or channeled via the Gulf, and this at a time when their takfir is being intensified against the nationalists and the patriots and the true Islamists....

People shouldn't lose sight of this for even a moment, the writer says, because what this American strategy amounts to as an attempt to change the war from one against the occupation to a sectarian Shiite-Sunni war, which will not stop until the sectarian takfiri power is the dominant one in Iraq.

And this is particularly ungent for Baathists to understand, because the first requisite for this American strategy is the crushing of the Baath Party, conceptually, organizationally, financially.

Because the Baath is the only nationalist party that covers all of Iraq and includes Sunnis, Shiites and others.

His second concluding observation is that Iran, even though it is naturally an enemy of the Sunni takfiris, still provides them with support and assistance in their attacks on Iraqi Shiites.

The reason is to make the Iraqi Shiites side with Iran, in a way that will ultimately further feed the conversion of this war into a sectarian one, in order to weaken the country.

New World Order Statistics of Human Misery of Soldiers and Military that fight for the 'Order'('The West' and their lackey's Warfare)

Excluding Somalia and various other secret engagements

icasualties.org

Of the 3,417 coalition deaths in Afghanistan:

One Albania

40 Australia

One Belgium

158 Canada

Five Czech

43 Denmark

Nine Estonia

Two Finland

86 France

27 Georgia

54 Germany

Seven Hungary

48 Italy

Two Jordan

Three Latvia

One Lithuania

10 Unidentified as to country NATO

25 Netherlands

11 New Zealand

10 Norway

38 Poland

Two Portugal

21 Romania

Three Slovakia

One South Korea

34 Spain

Five Sweden

14 Turkey

447 UK

2,309 US

To January 22, 2014

These figures are 'Battle deaths' and do not include deaths that take place as early as two or three weeks outside the Afghanistan war zones when seriously injured troops are shipped to their home country, or in the situation with the US military to some hospital on a military base in another country.

These figures do not include suicide of soldiers who have returned home, or the killing and injuring of loved ones and others outside the family, by soldiers with mental impairment who have returned home.

At least 17,674 US personnel have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon between November 2001 and September 2012.

These figures are 'Battle deaths' and do not include deaths that take place outside Iraq war zones, as early as two or three weeks, after seriously injured troops are shipped to their home country, or in the situation with the US military to some hospital on a military base in another country.

 other coalition deaths are estimated at up to 10,000 deaths including contract people brought into Iraq by coalition forces.

These figures do not include suicide of soldiers who have returned home, or the killing and injuring of loved ones and others outside the family, by soldiers with mental impairment who have returned home.

At least 32,223 U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon between March 2003 and November 2011.

...If the neocons all hopped a spaceship for the Hale-Bopp comet tomorrow  indeed, if the cult had never arisen at all  we would still be right where we are today: neck-deep in the Big Muddy.

That's not to say, of course, that we weren't misled into Iraq, or that strings aren't being pulled for a war on Iran, or that flames aren't being fanned to widen the Middle East war  or that the gaggle of third-rate thinkers and first-class troublemakers loosely grouped under the rubric "neocon" aren't intimately involved in all of these affairs.

They are, in spades.

But to accuse them of playing the central role in America's on-going Gõtterdõmmerung gives them an importance they don't deserve  and unduly mitigates the guilt of the true culprits:

The good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon boardroom buccaneers of the American Establishment, bred for generations to feast on war and rumors of war, and to regard the hoi polloi as mere cannon fodder and cash cows to be mulched and milked as needed.

For what's the underlying implication of the "neocons über alles" meme?

It's that hard-core, down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld  who have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of the government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus  are actually innocent lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of Richard Perle.

It's that the world-striding oil barons, Wall Street dynasts and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just wide-eyed rubes bamboozled into acting against their own interests by the dazzling sophistry of William Kristol and Michael Leeden.

It's that no U.S. administration would ever undertake the kind of rapacious policies we've seen in the last five years  unless they'd been tricked into it by wily Zionists and their ideological outriders.

It is, in short, our old friend "American exceptionalism," decked out in dissident drag.

Shakespeare pegged the neo-cons' true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in Julius Caesar.

Listen to Marc Antony dismissing his fellow triumvir Lepidus, and you will hear the authentic voice of Great Gamesters like Cheney, Rumsfeld and James Baker, dicing for world empire and using anything at hand  neo-cons, evangelicals, Caucasian despots, Arab tyrants, Israeli proxies, British lapdogs, Shiite death squads  to further their ambitions:

"This is a slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands.

...and though we lay these honours on this man, to ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, he shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, to groan and sweat under the business, either led or driven as we point the way.

And having brought our treasure where we will, then we take down his load and turn him off, like to the empty ass, to shake his ears and graze in commons."

Again, this is not to deny that neocon fingerprints are all over the various shivs and bludgeons that the Bush Regime has used in its whack jobs on the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments.

After all, the veritable blueprint for the whole godawful shebang  the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document of September 2000  was concocted under the aegis of that quintessentially neocon think tank, the Project for the New American Century.

...But without the presence of long-time Establishment power players like Cheney and Rumsfeld on the PNAC board, the plan would have remained the pipe dream of a few curdled academics and comb-licking policy wonks.

Indeed, it was the Great Gamesters themselves who set the neocons to work on devising ways to extend the "unipolar moment" of unchallenged American power that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The first version of the PNAC plan was drawn up at Cheney's order by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter "Leaker" Libby in 1992, in the last months of the Bush I administration.

Under Bush II, the neocons were brought in as shock troops.

Their mindless zealotry was a perfect tool for implementing the plans drawn up by the real players in the new regime: Cheney's notorious "Energy Task Force" and the much lesser-known "Joint Task Force on Petroleum" formed by the Council on Foreign Relations and  who else?  the James Baker Institute at Rice University.

It was here that the final solution for Iraq was hammered out...

These are dark days, serious times.

The whiff of apocalypse is in the air.

For it will be virtually impossible for the Gamesters to carry off their next immediate goal, subduing Iran  much less their long-range aim of dominating the world throughout a "new American century"  without the use of nuclear weapons.

So let's be done with the comforting fairy tale that the vast crimes we are witnessing are the work of a few cranks who have somehow hijacked the noble U.S. government and are using it for their own purposes, or Israel's purposes, or whatever.

The reality is that Iraq was invaded because a powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment wanted to do it and the rest of the Establishment  the Democrats, the media, the "respectable" intelligentsia  countenanced the crime.

The belligerence and oppression that the Israeli government is inflicting in Lebanon and Palestine are receiving unquestioned  and armed  support from the United States because this suits the larger strategic purposes of the "global dominance" faction of the Establishment, and the domestic political purposes both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American backing, and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical base.

[As many others have pointed out, whenever the Israelis try to do something that the American elite don't like -- such as sell sophisticated military technology to the Chinese  they are called on the carpet and forced to back down. ]

It is the American elite  pursuing, as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege, heedless of the consent of the governed or the genuine interests of the American people (or the Palestinian people or the Israeli people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi people)  that bedevils us.

The emergence of the cretinous neoconservative cult is just a symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant institutions and structures of American society.

Former British world champion boxer Chris Eubank stages a protest against the war in Iraq by parking his customised truck outside Downing Street in London March 29, 2007.

(right)

Iraqi children inspect a crater which they said was caused by a roadside bomb targeting a British occupying patrol in Basra.

Six occupying American and four occupying British troops were killed in attacks across Iraq as a US helicopter crashed south of Baghdad and Iraq resistance ambushed puppet government Iraq soldiers, April 5, 2007

Photos: REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico, AFP/Essam Al Sudani

Connections that lead directly to the heart of the Downing Street Letters:

Blair's lies to the UK parliament and UK people.

Lies central to the US claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking weapons of mass destruction.

Lies that missiles could get to London in 4 minutes.

Lies serving as a basis for the Iraq invasion less than two months later.

In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush declared the infamous sixteen words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

The claim was central to the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking weapons of mass destruction and served as a basis for launching the Iraq invasion less than two months later.

Bush’s declaration was based on an intelligence document that provided evidence about Iraq’s purchase of uranium from the African country of Niger.

But there was one problem: the document was a fake.

In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with the authors of two explosive new books.

Carlo Bonini is the Italian reporter who broke the Niger story.

His new book is called “Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror.”

Peter Eisner is a veteran foreign correspondent and is currently an editor at the Washington Post.

His new book is “The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq.”

Protest in Basra against

British occupation for oil

Chris Eubank argues with police

Parks truck outside 10 Downing Street

(left)

Protest in Basra, Iraq against British occupation for oil.

Iraqis protest against the UK continuing attacks on their country in the southern oil city of Basra, 16 April 2007.

(right)

Former British world champion boxer Chris Eubank argues with police whilst staging a protest against the Iraq war by parking his customised truck outside Downing Street in London March 29, 2007.

The message on the truck reads: Blair look after your own people and our country.

Millitary occupation for oil creates terrorism.

As long as we elect you, do as we want.

Health care, education, social security.

Photos: AFP/Essam Al-Sudani, REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico

“Inside Downing Street Tony Blair had gathered some of his senior ministers and advisers for a pivotal meeting in the build-up to the Iraq war.

It was 9am on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion began and long before the public was told war was inevitable.”

Protest in Basra against

British occupation for oil April 2007

Iraq, April 2007

4 years after occupation for oil

Almost a million dead

4 million displaced, scattered into other countries

Untold injured

Horror of US UK invasion continuing

(left)

Protest in Basra, Iraq against British occupation for oil.

Iraqis protest against the UK continuing attacks on their country in the southern oil city of Basra, 16 April 2007.

(right)

An Iraqi woman pushes a pram past occupying vehicles in Baghdad.

Former British world champion boxer Chris Eubank argued with police whilst staging a protest against the Iraq war by parking his customised truck outside Downing Street in London March 29, 2007.

The message on the truck read: Blair look after your own people and our country.

"The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running now."

Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real reason for attacking Iraq.

"It was 95 per cent charade," a former senior CIA analyst told me.

An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.

Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat  to America, Europe or the Middle East.

In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."

This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.

Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of "containment" that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator  again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again.

On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". America, he said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box".

Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq. "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country," she said. "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

So here were two of Bush's most important officials putting the lie to their own propaganda, and the Blair government's propaganda that subsequently provided the justification for an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq.

The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as British and American troops.

The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as British and American troops. There is no estimate of the countless thousands of wounded.

In a torrent of propaganda seeking to justify this violence before and during the invasion, there were occasional truths that never made headlines.

In April last year, Condoleezza Rice described September 11 2001 as an "enormous opportunity" and said America "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities."

Taking over Iraq, the world's second biggest oil producer, was the first such opportunity.

At 2.40pm on September 11, according to confidential notes taken by his aides, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, said he wanted to "hit" Iraq  even though not a shred of evidence existed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington.

"Go massive," the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Iraq was given a brief reprieve when it was decided instead to attack Afghanistan. This was the "softest option" and easiest to explain to the American people  even though not a single September 11 hijacker came from Afghanistan. In the meantime, securing the "big prize", Iraq, became an obsession in both Washington and London.

An Office of Special Plans was hurriedly set up in the Pentagon for the sole purpose of converting "loose" or unsubstantiated intelligence into US policy. This was a source from which Downing Street received much of the "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction we now know to be phoney.

CONTRARY to Blair's denials at the time, the decision to attack Iraq was set in motion on September 17 2001, just six days after the attacks on New York and Washington.

A decision has been made. Don't waste your breath

On that day, Bush signed a top-secret directive, ordering the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq. In July 2002, Condoleezza Rice told another Bush official who had voiced doubts about invading Iraq: "A decision has been made. Don't waste your breath."

The ultimate cynicism of this cover-up was expressed by Rumsfeld himself only last week.

When asked why he thought most Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, he replied: "I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe I could say that."

It is this that makes the Hutton inquiry in London virtually a sham.

By setting up an inquiry solely into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly, Blair has ensured there will be no official public investigation into the real reasons he and Bush attacked Iraq and into when exactly they made that decision.

He has ensured there will be no headlines about disclosures in email traffic between Downing Street and the White House, only secretive tittle-tattle from Whitehall and the smearing of the messenger of Blair's misdeeds.

Sheer scale of cover-up

The sheer scale of this cover-up makes almost laughable the forensic cross-examination of the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan about "anomalies" in the notes of his interview with David Kelly  when the story Gilligan told of government hypocrisy and deception was basically true.

Those pontificating about Gilligan failed to ask one vital question  why has Lord Hutton not recalled Tony Blair for cross-examination?

Why is Blair not being asked why British sovereignty has been handed over to a gang in Washington whose extremism is no longer doubted by even the most conservative observers?

No one knows the Bush extremists better than Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and personal friend of George Bush senior, the President's father.

The crazies

In Breaking The Silence, he tells me: "They were referred to in the circles in which I moved when I was briefing at the top policy levels as 'the crazies'."

"Who referred to them as 'the crazies'?" I asked.

"All of us... in policy circles as well as intelligence circles... There is plenty of documented evidence that they have been planning these attacks for a long time and that 9/11 accelerated their plan.

(The weapons of mass destruction issue) was all contrived, so was the connection of Iraq with al Qaeda.

It was all PR... Josef Goebbels had this dictum: If you say something often enough, the people will believe it." He added: "I think we ought to be all worried about fascism (in the United States)."

The "crazies" include John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who has made a personal mission of tearing up missile treaties with the Russians and threatening North Korea, and Douglas Feith, an Under Secretary of Defence, who ran a secret propaganda unit "reworking" intelligence about Iraq's weapons. I interviewed them both in Washington.

Killing of 10,000 Iraq civilians in invasion 'quite low'

BOLTON boasted to me that the killing of as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians in the invasion was "quite low if you look at the size of the military operation."

For raising the question of civilian casualties and asking which country America might attack next, I was told: "You must be a member of the Communist Party."

Over at the Pentagon, Feith, No 3 to Rumsfeld, spoke about the "precision" of American weapons and denied that many civilians had been killed.

When I pressed him, an army colonel ordered my cameraman: "Stop the tape!" In Washington, the wholesale deaths of Iraqis is unmentionable.

They are non-people; the more they resist the Anglo-American occupation, the more they are dismissed as "terrorists".

It is this slaughter in Iraq, a crime by any interpretation of an international law, that makes the Hutton inquiry absurd.

Spectre of thousands of dead human beings never mentioned

While his lordship and the barristers play their semantic games, the spectre of thousands of dead human beings is never mentioned, and witnesses to this great crime are not called.

Jo Wilding, a young law graduate, is one such witness.

She was one of a group of human rights observers in Baghdad during the bombing.

She and the others lived with Iraqi families as the missiles and cluster bombs exploded around them.

Where possible, they would follow the explosions to scenes of civilian casualties and trace the victims to hospitals and mortuaries, interviewing the eyewitnesses and doctors.

She kept meticulous notes.

She saw children cut to pieces by shrapnel and screaming because there were no anaesthetics or painkillers.

She saw Fatima, a mother stained with the blood of her eight children.

She saw streets, mosques and farmhouses bombed by marauding aircraft.

"Nothing could explain them," she told me, "other than that it was a deliberate attack on civilians."

As these atrocities were carried out in our name, why are we not hearing such crucial evidence?

And why is Blair allowed to make yet more self-serving speeches, and none of them from the dock?

Transcript of interview with Niels Harrit on Danish TV2 News 6th April 2009.

Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe

Danish TV2International researchers have found traces of explosives among the World Trade Center rubble.

A new scientific article concludes that impacts from the two hijacked aircraft did not cause the collapses in 2001.

We turn our attention to 9/11  the major attack in New York.

Apparently the two airplane-impacts did not cause the towers to collapse, according to a newly published scientific article.

Researchers found nano-thermite explosive in the rubble, that cannot have come from the planes.

They believe several tonnes of explosives were placed in the buildings in advance.

Niels Harrit, you and eight other researchers conclude in this article, that it was nano-thermite that caused these buildings to collapse. What is nano-thermite?

Niels HarritWe found nano-thermite in the rubble.

We are not saying only nano-thermite was used.

Thermite itself dates back to 1893.

It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat.

The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 °C.

This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron.

Nanotechnology makes things smaller. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed.

When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly.

Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive.

It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.

Danish TV2
I Googled nano-thermite, and not much has been written about it. Is it a widely known scientific substance? Or is it so new that other scientists are hardly aware of it?

Niels HarritIt is a collective name for substances with high levels of energy.

If civilian researchers (like myself) are not familiar with it, it is probably because they do not do much work with explosives.

As for military scientists, you would have to ask them.

I do not know how familiar they are with nanotechnology.

Danish TV2So you found this substance in the WTC, why do you think it caused the collapses?

Niels Harrit
Well, it's an explosive. Why else would it be there?

Danish TV2You believe the intense heat melted the building?s steel support structure, and caused the building to collapse like a house of cards?

Niels HarritI cannot say precisely, as this substance can serve both purposes.

It can explode and break things apart, and it can melt things.

Both effects were probably used, as I see it.

Molten metal pours out of the South Tower several minutes before the collapse.

This indicates the whole structure was being weakened in advance.

Then the regular explosives come into play.

The actual collapse sequence had to be perfectly timed, all the way down.

Danish TV2What quantities are we talking about?

Niels HarritA lot. There were only two planes, but three skyscrapers collapsed.

We know roughly how much dust was created.

The pictures show huge quantities, everything but the steel was pulverised.

And we know roughly how much unreacted thermite we have found.

This is the “loaded gun”, material that did not ignite for some reason.

We are talking about tonnes. Over 10 tonnes, possibly 100 tonnes.

Danish TV2
Ten tonnes, possibly 100 tonnes, in three buildings? And these substances are not normally found in such buildings?

Niels HarritNo. These materials are extremely advanced.

Danish TV2How do you place such material in a skyscraper, on all the floors?

Niels HarritHow you would get it in?

Danish TV2Yes.

Niels HarritIf I had to transport it in those quantities I would use pallets. Get a truck and move it in on pallets.

Danish TV2Why hasn't this been discovered earlier?

Niels HarritBy whom?

Danish TV2The caretakers, for example. If you are moving 10 to 100 tonnes of nano-thermite around, and placing it on all the floors. I am just surprised no-one noticed.

Niels HarritAs a journalist, you should address that question to the company responsible for security at the WTC.

Danish TV2So you are in no doubt the material was present?

Niels HarritYou cannot fudge this kind of science.

We have found it. Unreacted thermite.

Danish TV2What responses has your article received around the world?

Niels HarritIt is completely new knowledge for me.

It was only published last Friday. So it is too early to say.

But the article may not be as groundbreaking as you think.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world, have long known that the three buildings were demolished.

This has been crystal clear.

Our research is just the last nail in the coffin.

This is not the 'smoking gun', it is the 'loaded gun'.

Each day, thousands of people realise that the WTC was demolished.

That is something unstoppable.

Danish TV2Why has no-one discovered earlier that there was nano-thermite in the buildings? Almost ten years have passed.

Niels HarritYou mean in the dust?

Danish TV2Yes.

Niels HarritIt was by chance that someone looked at the dust with a microscope.

They are tiny red chips.

The biggest are 1 mm in size, and can be seen with the naked eye.

But you need a microscope to see the vast majority.

It was by chance that someone discovered them two years ago.

Danish TV2It has taken 18 months to prepare the scientific article you refer to.

Niels HarritIt is a very comprehensive article based on thorough research.

Danish TV2
You have been working on this for several years, because it didn't make sense to you.

Niels Harrit
Yes, over two years actually.

It all started when I saw the collapse of Building 7, the third skyscraper.

It collapsed seven hours after the twin towers.

And there were only two airplanes.

When you see a 47-storey building, 186m tall, collapse in 6.5 seconds, and you are a scientist, you think “what?”.

I had to watch it again… and again.

I hit the button 10 times, and my jaw dropped lower and lower.

Firstly, I had never heard of that building before.

And there was no visible reason why it should collapse in that way, straight down, in 6.5 seconds.

I have had no rest since that day.

Danish TV2
Ever since 9/11 there has been speculation, and conspiracy theories. What do you say to viewers who hear about your research and say, “we?ve heard it all before, there are lots of conspiracy theories”. What would you say to convince them that this is different?

Niels HarritI think there is only one conspiracy theory worth mentioning, the one involving 19 hijackers.

I think viewers should ask themselves what evidence they have seen to support the official conspiracy theory.

If anyone has seen evidence, I would like to hear about it

No-one has been formally charged. No-one is 'wanted'.

Our work should lead to demands for a proper criminal investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Because it never happened. We are still waiting for it.

We hope our results will be used as technical evidence when that day comes.